


Professionals

by hangingfire



Category: John Wick (Movies), The Culture - Iain M. Banks
Genre: Alternate Ending, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:14:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28110726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/pseuds/hangingfire
Summary: "John had an uncanny sensation of looking in a mirror."
Comments: 8
Kudos: 16
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Professionals

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karanguni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/gifts).



_Five years ago…_

The last thing standing between John Wick and the woman he loved had been one Grigory Yermilov, human trafficker and world champion scumbag. Of the targets on Viggo Tarasov's list, John had left him to last because he was pretty sure he'd be the most difficult nut to crack. The man had connections; his little black book was the stuff of mythology, and there were a lot of people in high places who had a vested interest in ensuring that he was protected and his information remained secret and safe.

Frankly, it was easier than he expected. It turns out a man gets careless when he thinks he's protected by certain libidinous heads of state.

John Wick stood over Yermilov's cooling body in his lavishly gaudy bedroom, almost not daring to believe he had succeeded.

Now, he had one more thing to do: a bonus, but a potentially brilliant one. Retrieve that legendary black book, which was actually an encrypted laptop. Yermilov had left it in his office, right next door. All that remained was to grab it and go.

John's hand was on the doorknob and he was about to turn it when he froze, his body reacting before his mind consciously registered a soft sound from the other side of that door. No one was supposed to be there. He'd accounted for every guard in the place. There were none of Yermilov's intimates or victims present this night; John had made sure of that. So who was it?

If Tarasov's double-crossed me ... he thought, and left it hanging. Time to concentrate on the now.

He drew his gun and leaned against the door, listening. There. Barely perceptible, the sound of someone lifting up an object almost, but not quite, silently.

John drew a breath, and in one motion pushed the door open and dived into the room. A bullet whizzed past his ear close enough to graze it and embedded itself in a particularly filthy Franz von Bayros engraving. As he dove for cover behind a vast couch upholstered in white brocade, John had an impression of a man with a shaved head and a forgettable face who seemed to be absolutely bristling with weapons. Guns on each hip, a rifle across the back, a strap on his thigh that was probably for a knife. A professional. 

Another bullet pierced the couch and emerged six inches from John’s head. He began to crawl, low against the ground; the other man hadn’t come any closer and he undoubtedly had his gun aimed at the other end of the couch, just waiting for John to emerge like a groundhog.

Fine. Time to take the fight to him.

John leapt up from behind the couch, and as he did so, he grabbed one of the cushions and flung it at the other man. The cushion exploded in a burst of gunfire and feathers as John vaulted over the couch, firing off half a dozen shots. 

But his target had already ducked down behind the desk and suddenly the chandelier overhead shattered into a shower of Swarovski shards as the mystery man blew it away, plunging the room into near-darkness. The only light now was a sliver of moonlight through the curtains behind the desk. John’s eyes barely had time to adjust when suddenly a heavy body plowed into his, knocking him to the floor and sending his gun flying.

Jesus fucking Christ, this guy was _good_. John couldn’t remember the last time someone had gotten the drop on him in a room where there were only two real potential hiding places. 

John brought his knee up, slamming the other man in the abdomen, and was rewarded with a pained grunt. An elbow caught him in the jaw, rattling his teeth; he braced himself against the floor and pushed himself free. A hot line of pain lit up along his arm—fuck, the goddamn _knife_. He staggered to his feet and grabbed the first thing that came to hand: a bronze letter-opener. Well, needs must, as the saying goes.

The other man’s knife flashed dully; John blocked it, ducked, danced away. He parried another slice, felt the tip of the letter-opener graze something soft. He found himself with his back against the desk, and when the other man swiped at him again, John leaped backward onto the desk, sending papers flying into his opponent’s face. He jumped off the desk, launching himself at the window, and grabbed the heavy velvet curtains and used his weight to rip them down, flooding the office with moonlight.

He and the other man stared at each other across Yermilov’s desk, and John had an uncanny sensation of looking in a mirror. He couldn’t have said why; the man’s ordinary face was nothing like his own, but their builds were similar, and the way he stood, the way his stillness was so clearly a prelude to carefully calculated violence, well … 

He’s a weapon, John thought, and that was the last thing that crossed his mind for a while, because the other man suddenly raised his gun and fired upward, and John had just enough time to be confused by this before he heard the heavy brass curtain rod above him detach itself from the wall. He tried to get out of the way, but his legs were tangled in the curtains and the rod descended on his skull, followed by darkness.

When John woke some short amount of time later, the other man was gone. He’d clearly made his exit through the bay window, which hung open and was now letting in rain. John extracted himself from the curtains and staggered to his feet, wiping the blood from his face.

Yermilov’s laptop was gone. Tarasov would be disappointed, but he was just going to have to live with it. John made his way out of Yermilov’s house and disappeared into the night with a song in his heart and the vision of Helen’s face in his mind to keep him going. 

He tried, later, to find out who the mystery man was, but no one—not even Winston—had so much as a lead. If he’d been staying in the business, he’d have tried harder … but now there was Helen to think of, and it was easier to put that puzzle, along with the rest of his history of violence, behind him.

* * *

_Now_ …

John staggers into his house, every nerve on fire, blood still seeping from the wound Tarasov left in his side. The pit bull nudges his leg and whimpers.

“It’s okay, boy, it’s okay,” John murmurs. “Gonna be fine. Just need to call a guy.”

He makes it as far as the living room, where he collapses on the floor. He tries to get his phone out of his pocket, but his arm doesn’t seem to want to work, and when he finally manages it, he watches as the battery dies.

Fuck.

As the room starts to go hazy and he can’t quite hear right anymore, he suddenly feels the touch of cool strong fingers on his forehead and he hears a female voice saying something gentle that he can’t quite make out. “Helen—?” he croaks.

He wakes up in his own bed. He’s been cleaned up, his wounds dressed expertly, and the pit bull is snoring prodigiously next to him. He reaches over and pats the dog, who snorts in his sleep and rolls onto his back, undignified and content.

“Good morning, Mr. Wick.”

John reaches for his gun, but it’s not there.

A woman steps into his bedroom. She’s tall and graceful, with dark hair and tawny skin—Malaysia, he thinks, though even as the notion forms, he questions it. There’s something strange about her—alien?—and he can’t put his finger on it. She’s holding what looks like a canvas document folio under her arm.

“Who the hell are you?” he asks. “How’d you get in here?”

“I’m sorry. I usually don’t make a practice of breaking and entering, but you were _definitely_ in trouble, and I wanted to make sure you ended up in one piece.” She smiles a little. “My name is Diziet, Mr. Wick. I’ve … been watching your work.”

“Who do you work for? The High Table? Yeoh?” What is this accent of hers? He can’t place it any more than her ethnicity.

She shakes her head. “None of the above. I work for a special organization, one you won’t know.” There’s a faint emphasis on the word _special_.“As a matter of fact, you met a colleague of mine five years ago. That’s how we know about you.”

“Refresh my memory.”

Diziet opens the document folio and tosses its contents on the bed. The dog wakes with an indignant grunt and rolls over, scooting closer. John leans forward and picks up the object.

“This is Yermilov’s laptop,” he says after a moment. Remembering the exploding chandelier, the moonlight, the weapon.

“That’s right. Zakalwe—that’s the man you met—was impressed enough to have specifically discussed you in the debrief. And that’s why I’m here, Mr. Wick. My organization is preparing for something fairly substantial, and you might say I’m in these parts doing recruiting for it. I’m here to offer you a job.”

“No.” John sinks back on the pillows. “Lady, I appreciate the interest, but I have had an extremely trying week and the last thing I want to do is _go back to work_.”

“Will you hear me out?” She looks at him, her expression surprisingly kind. “Let me explain, and if you still aren’t interested when I’m done, I’ll leave, and you won’t see hide nor hair of me or my associates again. I promise you’ll be unharmed—no one will touch you.” Her gaze goes to the dog, and she smiles, the unmistakable look of a person who loves furry creatures. 

John snorts, and immediately regrets it when pain shoots through his side. “Promises.”

“I keep mine,” Diziet says, her eyes bright and sincere.

He looks at her. He looks down at the dog that’s leaning against him. At the empty spot where Helen used to rest her head. 

“Okay,” he says. “Shoot.”

Suddenly, from just outside the bedroom, there’s an aggrieved voice: “Can I come in yet?”

Diziet raises her eyes to heaven and groans. “Shut _up_ ,” she yells out the door.

“I’m supposed to help you make your case—”

At this point, John is absolutely certain that his injuries are making him hallucinate, because that sure as fuck cannot possibly be a grey metal suitcase _hovering in the air_ , with a greyish-blue aura surrounding it like a small portable fog.

Diziet pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs. “Drone. We agreed, we weren’t going to hit him with _you_ right away.”

“Waiting isn’t going to make it go down any easier, Diz.”

“ _So help me_ , you call me that one more time—” Diziet breaks off and turns back to John, who is still staring at the suitcase-thing in disbelief.

“What,” he finally manages, ”is that?”

“That,” Diziet says, “is a spectacularly self-important—”

“I’m _right here_.”

“—bodyguard drone, who has decided unilaterally to shove you in the deep end.”

She sits down on the edge of the bed carefully to keep from jostling him. She takes a deep breath; meanwhile, the aura around the drone shifts between grey and blue like a stormy sky. 

“My full name,” the woman says, “is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da’Marenhide. I represent the Special Circumstances agency of the interplanetary civilization known as the Culture. And I want you, Mr. John Wick, to come work for us.”

**Author's Note:**

> “Crossover ideas: John Wick (and Zakalwe get into a gun fight?)” That prompt was an irresistible combination; I hope it was at least half as fun to read as it was to write. Happy Yuletide, [karanguni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/gifts%22)!
> 
> Many thanks to [Gammarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gammarad) for the beta-read!
> 
> [Yuletide reveal post](https://hangingfire.tumblr.com/post/639148712851062784), for anyone interested.


End file.
